User:VictoriaMathews/sandbox/John Mathews

John Mathews John Duncan Mathews is an epidemiologist with a focus on biostatistics, mathematical modelling, genetic epidemiology, Aboriginal health, transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, herbicides and cancer, radiation and cancer, public health policy.

He was born in Parkes New South Wales, May 15, 1940. During the mid-1950 Mathews attended Coburg High School, later studying at the University of Melbourne.

From 1964 to 1967 Mathews’ worked in the Papua New Guinean highlands, studying the transmission spread of kuru, with Carleton Gajdusek and Michael Alpers. He then returned to Melbourne where he worked on the epidemiology of autoimmunity, computer diagnoses at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

Mathews worked with Sir Richard Doll at the University of Oxford, having gained the CJ Martin Fellowship in 1972. During his time there, he worked with Doll, Richard Peto and Leo Kinlen and co-authored publications on cancer in nickel workers and the side effects of vasectomy. He returned to Melbourne in 1975.

For the next ten years, Mathews was a Research Fellow funded by the National Health and Medical Research Committee. As Principal Research Fellow for the Department of Medicine at the Royal Melbourne Hospital he worked with John Hopper and Nick Martin to establish the Australian Twins Registry where he established guides on genetic epidemiology.

In the early 80s Mathews became a Senior Scientific Adviser for the Agent Orange Royal Commission, and adviser to the government on radiation matters. It was also during this time that he served on committees and Advisory Councils, including the Board of the Australian Institute for Family Studies, the Australian Ionising Radiation Advisory Council, and a number of NHMRC Committees.

Mathews was appointed as the Robert Menzies Professor of the University of Sydney and the Foundation Director of the Menzies School of Health Research, in 1984. He spent the next 15 years leading and a multidisciplinary research team in the health if indigenous communities. He established the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Aboriginal and Tropical Health, with Lowitja O’Donoghue as chair. Over coming many cultural conflicts, Mathews negotiated an agreement with the Tiwi people of Bathurst and Melville Islands where by the collected research and samples were held in trust on behalf of the Tiwi people. By maintaining ownership of the research and the the sample, the Tiwi people were able to establish a positive relationship with mainstream science and health care.

In 1999 Mathews moved to Canberra as the inaugural Head of the Centre for Disease Control. Here he worked the Richard Smallwood on SARS, Mad Cow and Bird Flu. Mathews returned to Melbourne in 2004, where he continues study and publish on the epidemiology radiation exposure and the future of data linkage..